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Comment by a3n | Hacker News Reader

I do the opposite. I don't want to spend the time driving around looking at stuff, so I research online, and then find where it's sold locally. 'cause I want it the instant I pay for it, and returns are much easier and immediate at a store.

I do buy from Amazon, but Amazon is also one of the best research tools for local buying.

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I'm shocked that people continue to "showroom" items. The local Best Buy has a terrible selection of items and the employees don't know any more about the products than I do. It doesn't make any sense to go to Best Buy for anything at all - there is almost literally zero value added by a big chain electronics store.

I can think of a few things that you just need to see or feel.

I was shopping for a monitor and all the reviews on Amazon are great but I can't see the difference on my current monitor or what it actually looks like despite all the specs listed.

I did buy it on Amazon but only after I saw the actual differences in store.

Yeah for something like a tv or monitor, you have to see it in person or you're rolling the dice. How's the glare? How does it look from other angles beside straight on? Hows this 4K res compare to the one next to it?

Even if Amazon could provide a Hololens sessions for me to look at the product (which maybe they should do at some future Amazon retail location) alongside all the specs and reviews, it's still not going to bridge the gap of seeing it in person.

Amazon could integrate that into Amazon Prime Now (1 hour delivery service). They could charge a small showroom fee and have a driver go out with a "floor model" they keep at the warehouse and an unopened box model for if you want to buy it on the spot.

Wow. The value of human time is incredibly low, if that can be made to work.

I have this thought every time I see a sign waiver.

Depends on your preferences... I prefer to read reviews online then buy in the store. One reason being, you get the product right away. Second, if the product is defective, it is just another quick drive to the store to have it replaced.

I am like this also... I wish I could just type into a search engine what I'm looking for and it comes up with

"Hey, this thing is available at these local retailers for these prices, all within 5km of your house. Here are the returns policies for those places. Here are the caveats to their warranty programs. These places have free parking. Caution: Place X, Y or Z only takes cash. Here's a list of ATMs enroute."

I really only buy from Amazon if I don't need something right now. Parting with my money only to have to wait for what I paid for for 4-6 weeks rubs me the wrong way.

Conversely, retail outlets could easily win me back by having their full catalogue on their website, which details in-store stock availability for my closest stores along with their final prices (including applicable discounts and taxes) and allowing me to place a hold on that item so that when I get to the store, it is there, waiting for me. The store locators are good and telling me how many are available in the store I've chosen is a good starting point, but it would be way more useful if I could put in what I'm looking for and then the site tell me the closest store that has availability and allow me to place a hold. Don't make me dig to figure out where I've gotta find stuff - remove the friction.

I've gotta be honest, it would take almost nothing to get me to go back to retail stores. Mostly I don't go because:

- I hate queueing up to wait for stuff - because I hate crowds of people and I hate wasting time. Time is the one commodity that nobody can replace no matter how rich you are. Stop wasting mine.

- The customer service is atrocious. I'm in your store because I need a product that you happen to provide. You're after my money. Appreciate that I could take my business somewhere I don't have to put up with the friction I have to suffer at your store or your diabolical staff attitudes.

- The warranties and provisos to their return policies are intentionally misleading. You have a product I want. You don't have to mislead me to buy it... if you're being so underhanded as to lead me to purchase items that are actually of zero use to me by making me believe that they are of use to me - until such a time as I try to use them and find that they are useless, there's a special place reserved in hell for you.

Find ways to remove those obstacles and I'll be back in a heartbeat. It doesn't take much:

- Appreciate my business.

- Make it easy to do business with you.

- Remove the obstacles and unnecessary friction that make me want to go elsewhere.

Agree with all.

On the warranties: I think that the warranties are offered by someone else. The airlines do it that way for travel insurance. It's probably a no brainer for an executive meeting with a warranty rep to say "hell yeah, almost no cost to us, and lots of people are stupid enough to buy this."

The retailer is paid to disrespect you.

Yes. Personally, I like to say: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is to separate it from good men with enough levels of abstraction".

Or as the great HN quote goes,

"Any sufficiently advanced business model is indistinguishable from a scam." -- dsirijus, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227941

You wait 4-6 weeks for delivery?

For some stuff, I have waited even longer... and that's even living in a modern connected city in North America.

Wow. I routinely wait 3 weeks for stuff from China. The few things that I can get locally, the Chinese are 1/4 the price, if not less.

And then there's things that are hard/impossible to get. Laser modules, radio boards, high velocity GPS boards. Those sorts of things.

agreed, an accurate in store inventory listing on retailers' websites are vital for this to work. Nothing more frustrating then doing research online, getting to the store to find out they don't actually have the item in stock, or cant't find it. Then its straight onto an online shop - and not the brick and mortar retailers.

This is the holy grail of "omni-channel retail" - of being able to offer a consistent experience across all channels. But spend a few days inside any large retail company and you'll be shocked at how badly organized they are. Not only do their systems not talk to one another, their people in e-commerce and b&m operations barely know each other.

This seems to be true for most large companies. From the outside, everything looks great and everyone is going towards one clear direction but internally, everyone is actually in an isolated silo living its own life and no-one actually discuss with each other. On the worst cases, you even have some internal competition within these silos.

I've seen this even in small companies.

Yeah, I'm a mix between the two. I do use Amazon because it makes it easy to compare lots of products and prices and when they have something I want with Prime shipping (and occasionally same-day shipping) it beats driving around to the store.

At the same time, if something is available at roughly the same price (can be a little more) at a local store, I would just as soon pick it up in person and avoid the shipping delay. Essentially, I'm willing to pay a little more for fast delivery but I'm just as willing to pay a little more for the "instant gratification" of just being able to go pick the thing up.

The main difference I've found is that lots of physical retail stores often don't have what I want or their online inventory system is unreliable so something will show as in stock locally but when I go to the actual store, it's nowhere to be found. Shopping online (for me) is often more about finding the exact item I want than it is about saving a few bucks by ordering direct.

Recent example: a friend wanted me to build him a new desktop PC for general use and for gaming. Maybe 5 years ago I'd have gone straight to Newegg because no retail location would have the selection of parts needed to build the best PC I could build within his budget. But now we have a Microcenter nearby and while smaller components (cables, RAM, etc) might cost a few dollars more per item, they sell CPUs at a sizable discount as loss leaders so the total build is roughly equal to the Newegg price plus shipping cost. In that case, it's nicer to just go to the store, compare stuff like build quality of computer cases in person, get everything home that day (no shipping wait), and have a local place where I can go if something turns out to be defective. No waiting for lengthy RMA shipping delays, just an hour on a Saturday to stop in and swap something out.

So I guess from a customer's perspective, retail is still a good option and worth some level of cost premium as long as selection is good and I can verify that the items I want are in stock. The other bit I haven't mentioned is access. In the case of Microcenter, I just walk in, grab a cart, and pick up all of my parts. When I just bought an iPhone to replace my girlfriend's older model, I ordered direct from Apple rather than going to the Apple store. Apple store would've had the phone in my hand on the same day but it is located in a shopping mall. I really, really hate going to that shopping mall because it means driving around a parking garage and then navigating floors of shops and escalators and crowds in order to get to the Apple store. I'll totally wait a day or two for shipping if it means I don't need to step foot in the mall.

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